When faced with the complexity of item inventory, independently of the business sector, today's warehouses have a common objective of making their packaging supply chain logistic more robust and more efficient. They have to monitor efficiently the items visibly and keep track of the movements of numerous items before being assembled at the case and palletized.
Furthermore, a major objective of the packaging supply chains logistic is to be able to locate and account for item assets throughout their life cycle and provide transaction visibility across logistic systems. Transaction visibility provides an organization with timely and accurate information on the location, movement, status and identity for improving the overall inventory process. Consequently, for achieving such a process performance most of the organizations must also consider how pallet loads created at the warehouse, especially rainbow pallets (pallets of mixed products), will be properly identified and tagged and finally tracked. Generally, to meet these objectives, today's packaging supply chains use the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) capabilities for optimizing the performance of their overall inventory process. The RFID technology suits the process automation as well as the volume production and matches various business expectations in sectors where numerous items need to be identified by type or/and by physical characteristics and other differentiating parameters.
Even if there are various RFID possibilities available today for monitoring a packaging supply chain, one difficulty resides in identifying heterogeneous tagged items in large areas such as factory or distribution yard at the same time, ensuring that the reading of each tagged item avoids reader collision. A reader collision appears when a signal from one reader interferes with the signal from another reader.
It is also desirable for an organization to implement a robust technique for tracking pallet/case inventories either discretely (i.e. all pallets/cases IDs are recorded and aggregate quantities identified) or more simply quantity by type and to easily identify the content of each pallet either in bulk or as unique IDs.
Independent of the technique, a major concern resides when an organization needs discriminating among a large variety of heterogeneous tagged items already placed on the pallets/cases or not, namely the tagged items that have identification parameters allowing a reader to aggregate them according to their geographical location.
Usually a reader expects to read tagged items confined in a given volume. The given volume, most of the time, represents the volume of the cases stacked on a pallet. Despite the tuning of the reader, the reading of the information on multiple tagged items that are located inside a box or package can be polluted by the unexpected tagged items located in a close proximity also answering to the reader request and therefore introducing errors.
It is also desirable to ensure that a reader is capable of collecting the identification parameters from a series of tags that are assembled together, whether in a box or in a package by avoiding multiple readings as well as by preventing reading collisions.
Another concern is ensuring that the reading is not affected by close proximity of tags responding to the reader thereby generating undesirable electromagnetic radiation to the queried tag.
A technique that is generally adopted for discriminating tagged items in a delimited vicinity is the use of sophisticated RFID directional antennas in combination with tags that are especially designed to have a high gain in controlled environment and orientation (i.e. squiggle tag or I2 tag). Unfortunately, the use of such technique does not avoid the undesirable radiation of the adjacent tags affecting the tag answering to the reader.
To summarize, prior art tools and methods present several drawbacks as follows.
Existing tools and methods do not allow a pallet management system to identify efficiently aggregated tagged items in a delimited vicinity.
Existing tools and methods do not offer the possibility of reading a series of tagged items that are assembled together in a predefined volume, whether in a box or in a package, in cases or/and pallets.
Existing tools and methods do not allow a supply chain to identify a list of tagged items that are located in a delimited vicinity by reading a tag once.
Existing tools and methods do not minimize the reading collision when discriminating a unique tagged item that is close to a series of adjacent tags in the same case and/or pallet.
Exiting tools and methods using sophisticated RFID directional antennas in combination with tags especially designed to have a high gain in controlled environment and orientation do not eliminate efficiently reading collision.
As mentioned above, the known solutions are not fully appropriate to identify aggregated tagged items in a delimited vicinity by avoiding reading collision due to the close proximity of tagged items.
Furthermore, the existing tools and methods do not allow a reader to get in one shot the identification of a list of tagged items that are considered as adjacent by the reader when scanning pallets/cases all along the packaging supply chain process.
The present invention offers a solution to solve the aforementioned problems.